SLVDR is a casual lifestyle apparel brand born in Southern California, inspired by snowboarding and surfing culture. It’s a newer company that basically had a bunch of images for a website, completely depleted of keywords and not ranking at all in search engines.
It didn’t have any analytics setup either, so I can’t say with certainty how much an impact my changes have made. But before I started working on it, the site hadn’t really been indexed in the search engine results pages and now after only a month (as of July 2009); it’s already sitting at Page Rank 2.
The initial push I think is really important to getting traction and building momentum. If you don’t build your site properly from the start, you’re throwing away a lot of what could’ve been. If only they’d used keywords that would’ve been indexed instead of images; they’d be doing a lot better.
Search engine optimization (SEO) originally wasn’t what SLVDR hired me to do; they were just looking for a website that got the job done and updated easy. That’s why the design is kind of simple. I made their website as straightforward as can be to maintain without requiring any HTML.
To make that possible, I developed their website using WordPress as the content management system (CMS). I just figured if we’re designing and developing a new website from ground up anyway, I might as well build a solid foundation for the company’s future online.
Besides, no matter how good a website may look or feel, it doesn’t do you any good without the traffic to convert and that’s why I look to SEO first in determining how I’m going to design and eventually develop the website. A little planning will go a long way in getting a return on your investment.
